New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash announced the winners of this year’s NC State Short Story Contest Wednesday evening in the Caldwell Lounge.
The contest, which first began in 2003, awards winners, finalists and honorable mentions in two categories: the 2014 James Hurst Prize for Fiction and the NCSU Prize for Short Fiction. Additionally, one story was awarded the 2014 NCSU Undergraduate Fiction Prize.
Two winners selected for short fiction and the James Hurst Prize for Fiction received a cash prize and copies of Cash’s new novel, The Dark Road to Mercy.
“I told the two guys who won I saw a lot of heart in what they wrote,” Cash said. “In this day and age, there’s a lot of drive to be witty and intellectual, which is great. But if you can do that and also make people feel something, then why not do that?”
Wilton Barnhardt, a professor of creative writing, who has been running the contest for the past 10 years, said the contest has recently been expanded to include every college and university in the state, mainly their English departments.
Since its inception, the contest has been judged by a professional writer from North Carolina.
“We’re dependent a lot on local writers,” Barnhardt said. “We usually have someone famous, someone nationally known.”
Ross Garrison, a first-year MFA student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, was the winner of the James Hurst prize for fiction for his short story Migration.
“If you are trying to become a writer, you spend so much time sending stuff out into the void,” Garrison said. “It’s gratifying to hear something back. It seems like more of a conversation instead of just talking to a wall.”
Other first prize winners include Cadwell Turnbull, a graduate student studying creative writing, who won the 2014 NCSU Prize for Short Fiction, and Marcus Blyden, a junior studying English, who won the 2014 NCSU Undergraduate Fiction Prize.
“The hardest part about being published is writing,” said Cash. “I didn’t have time to write a book – but I did. It’s carving out the time and making the time to write.”
Cash, a native of Gastonia, North Carolina, read excerpts from his two novels and answered the audience’s questions about writing and publishing. He discussed his inspiration for writing, which largely stemmed from the homesickness he experienced after leaving North Carolina to study at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he earned his PhD.
“I wanted to live in a place wholly different from where I had been,” Cash said. “I learned that there is no true American South. I was terribly homesick for North Carolina. I began to think of all the things I had enjoyed passively while I lived there, that I actively remembered in Louisiana. I returned to the things that had meant something to me.”
Cash blended his homesickness for North Carolina with the inspiration he had for his stories; both of his novels are set in North Carolina.
“I knew I could take that story and put it in North Carolina,” Cash said. “Writing this book was like writing a love letter to a place I had left behind.”
Some students were moved by Cash’s reading and were compelled to consider new genres.
“His writing is really vivid and engaging,” said Darren Lipman, a senior studying math and political science. “It encouraged me to buy the book. His reading brought the story to life and made me want to read something I wouldn’t normally.”
Cash said the direction of his novels are based on people’s choices and actions.
“I like stories where men and women make bad decisions because they have to do penance for those decisions, and that affects a lot of different people,” Cash said.
